Antisocial protests

The social protest ringleaders exposed their motives and thereby alienated Mr. and Ms. Average Israeli.

The attempts to revive the moribund social protests by any
means led to inevitable clashes with the law in Tel Aviv last Friday and
Saturday. These altercations couldn’t conceivably have been unforeseen given the
blocking of major traffic arteries, vandalizing of bank branches and insistence
on re-erecting illegal tent cities in public spaces.

The friction
surprised no one. It likely was the desired effect, the spark that was aimed at
reigniting the lost excitement.

Yet thereby the organizers – who so
unexpectedly managed to dominate our streets and public discourse last summer –
managed just as astoundingly to sabotage their own cause in one reckless
weekend. They seemed to have lost sight of the secret to their success
yesteryear.

That secret was ambiguity. As long as they weren’t
politically identifiable and seemed to attract disparate segments of the
population, they could claim to voice the disaffection of ordinary workaday
Israelis who hanker after the good life.

The nonsectarian, apolitical
appeal drew crowds of participants to their camp-ins and mass outdoor
happenings, replete with celebrity entertainment and media hoopla.

Their
populist events became good fun, to which to take the kids and demand higher
living standards. It was all ostensibly mainstream, the in-thing, nothing overly
controversial and certainly not confrontational or violent.

This
all-inclusiveness may have been misleading but it was magic, because all sorts
of diverse folks were made to feel they belonged and were speaking for the
majority of their compatriots. It may all have been a cunning façade but it was
hard to prove that the multitudes were manipulated.

After this past
weekend, though, it’s no longer hard. The ringleaders had exposed their motives
and thereby alienated Mr. and Ms. Average Israeli.

This doesn’t mean that
the demonstrations are dead and gone. They may well return, whether violently or
more calmly, but they won’t replicate the everyman ambiance that was lost
Saturday night. Whatever occurs now will bear a clear political tint.

It
may well be that a hodgepodge of groups will back the provocations or
opportunistically egg them on and hope to reap political profits from them. But
whether future protests are fueled by zealous anarchists or a more garden
variety of socialists, they will be grasped as left wing and outside the
consensus.

However the ensuing protests evolve, they will become
radicalized – something with which the decidedly non-radical middle class would
feel less and less disposed to identify.

Nobody wishes to become a useful
fool in the service of narrow political interests. Nobody wants to feel
used.

The Israeli public is altogether remarkably disinclined to doing
battle with law enforcers. It’s unforgiving toward those who do.

Thus, no
matter how justified some settler protests may have appeared, interference with
the flow of traffic and fisticuffs with the police (regardless of who was more
brutish) generated antagonistic responses.

That’s why Ulpana residents –
evicted this week from legally purchased homes due to possible bureaucratic
errors not of their own making – were wary of resorting to force.

It
would indeed serve us well to ponder how public opinion and the press would have
reacted had distressed Ulpana dwellers swooped down on Tel Aviv, halted traffic,
smashed storefront windows and sparred with the police.

Just as such
action would lose aggrieved settlers sympathy, so it estranges the masses from
what are hyped as social justice protests.

Even if last weekend’s
disturbances weren’t calculated provocations, as per the denials of the protest
orchestrators, they isolated themselves and forfeited the solidarity of the
politically uninvolved center. The bulk of last year’s summertime protesters
turned out because they felt part of Israel’s middle-of-the-road majority,
because they could bask in the implied commonality and camaraderie without
losing control and risking or inflicting bodily harm.

Shrill slogans to
bring down the government and the system, and blows exchanged with cops (and,
again, it doesn’t really matter who started it and who was more brutish),
relegate the campaign to the political fringe and distance it from the
mainstream. The middle class semblance of the antecedent demonstrations has now
been undone.

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